The distinction between the subject of the enunciation (the “emp-ty”, universal subject) and the subject of the enunciated (what we tell about ourselves, our values, etc.) is important to keep in mind, before I move to the concluding point. For I nonetheless think that a certain kind of populism is necessary to make it possible to enun-ciate new kinds of political solutions and reinvigorate the concept of a public use of reason.
Populism is the political movement that claims to speak on be-half of the people (populus), and ideally that would imply a kind of enunciation that cannot so easily be reduced to “private interests”.
When public debate has been so thoroughly privatized, as it has today, it may be time to experiment with the very idea of the public, i.e. to “open spaces”, if you will, where it is possible to speak again as a public and to a public – in the best interests of mankind in gen-eral, as Kant and Mill would have put it. What is required is a new form of free speech that fosters genuinely new thoughts and ena-bles a reinvigoration of the public use of reason. The right wing populist movements, however, do not contribute much to this am-bition, as they are emphasizing certain forms of well-known con-tent (what Jacques Rancière has called “archépolitics” (Rancière 1999, 65)), much more than they are really contributing to political progress, neither on the formal level, nor on the level of contents.
Nonetheless, I think that some of the movements and parties that have emerged since the global financial crisis in 2008 have brought interesting new experiments in the struggle for raising voices that were very recently considered utopian, irresponsible or impossible, but nonetheless rely on strictly democratic ideals and methods. I think it is reasonable to suggest that what many of these move-ments are trying to answer is the question: “How does one reinvent the public use of reason in an age of almost complete privatization of reason and of the so called “politics of necessity”? ”How does the public emancipate itself, when it has been almost completely dis-empowered by the prevailing economic order?” As space does not allow me to go into any empirical detail and analyze e.g. Occupy Wall Street in the US, Podemos in Spain, or Syriza in Greece, I will instead attempt a more formal definition of my point, maybe just mentioning in passing that one of the characteristics of these move-ments is precisely that they experiment with more democratic
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forms of decision making, voting, institution building, etc. (See e.g.
Zechner/Hansen, 2015).
In right wing populist movements, the people (in the sense of a general subject of enunciation with the right to decide for itself) is not enunciating a new content. Rather, an old content is identifying the subjects that are mobilized to repeat it as “the people”. The dif-ference is, whether you move from a particular content, regarding for instance national identity, and “backwards” toward the position of enunciation, demanding that all speaking subjects must be shaped in “our” picture, or whether you move from the empty, uni-versal subject to an experiment or an act that risks the articulation of what we could want to say. In the first case, collectivity is estab-lished as a homogenizing effect of definitions and initiatives from a political elite; in the second, collectivity is an emergence of some-thing new from a more or less spontaneous act of a group of other-wise very different individuals. Maybe one could distinguish be-tween collectivity through assimilation to a pre-established identity versus collectivity through a unification of the non-identical in a demand for new political ideas.
In any case, the limit of populism, which must be kept firmly in mind, if one wants to stay within the broad frame of the tradition of the enlightenment, (and I think one should stay within the broad frame of the enlightenment), is the right to disagree with it, as well as the right to express this disagreement.
References
Althusser, L. 2001 [1970]. ”Ideology and Ideological State Appa-ratuses”, in: Lenin and Philosophy and other essays, New York:
Monthly Review Press.
Cerny, P. 1997. ”Paradoxes of the Competition State: The Dynamics of Political Globalization”, Government & Opposition, Vol. 32, 02, pp. 251-274.
Kant, I. 1987 [1790]. The Critique of Judgment, Indianapolis/Cam-bridge: Hackett Publishing Company.
Kant, I. 1996 [1784]. ”An answer to the question: What is enlighten-ment?”, in: Practical Philosophy, New York: Cambridge Universi-ty Press, pp. 11-22.
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Mill, J. S. 1993 [1859]. “On Liberty.” In: Utilitarianism, On Liberty, Considerations on Representative Government, London: Everyman.
Pedersen, O. K. 2011. Konkurrencestaten, København: Hans Reit-zels Forlag.
Rancière, J. 1999 [1995]. Disagreement: Politics and Philosophy, Minne-apolis/London: University of Minnesota Press.
Zechner, M. and B.R. Hansen, 2015. “Building Power in a Crisis of Social Reproduction”, ROAR Magazine, Issue 0.
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